


Looking Up

by nearlywitches



Category: Paramore
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-26
Updated: 2014-06-26
Packaged: 2018-02-06 07:45:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1850062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nearlywitches/pseuds/nearlywitches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I'm always wrong but you're never right.<br/>Oh, you're never right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Hayley Williams had gotten used to the sight of empty airports.  
  
It was an occupational hazard of the job; spend one third of your life on an aeroplane, another third in airports at three in the morning and the final third on a stage. Avoid the rush-hour flights in order to make it back to your hotel without having to fight your way through a crowd. It wasn’t the way of life she had envisioned years back, but it was routine. A routine that had become oddly engrained into her everyday life - almost like the safe feeling of a warm blanket when the rain was battering off of the window panes or the gentle purring of a cat that lured you into their presence. It was familiar. It was comforting.  
  
It was home.  
  
It had surprised Hayley at first, the ease with which she could just pack up and leave at a moment’s notice. It had been an uphill struggle at first with tearful goodbyes to family members and hours spend brooding in the back of a beaten-up tour van. Now, she felt more at-home when she was flying than she did when she was snug in the confines of her own bed, aspiring to things she had already achieved at the tender age of nineteen.  
  
As she pulled her suitcase along the spotless carpets of Nashville International airport, scowling uncharacteristically as the wheels caught on the material, Hayley couldn’t help but dread going home. The past year had been a whirlwind, from releasing an album to touring the world. Tensions had been high, but any arguments or annoying nuances had been brushed over because there just wasn’t  _time_  to worry about them. Now that she was going home, she had all of the time in the world and nothing to occupy her mind.  
  
“Can you guys believe that while we were all asleep, we pretty much crossed the entire planet? How cool is that!”  
  
Hayley worked to supress a groan. No matter the hour, baby-faced Zac Farro could be counted on to be unusually chipper. It was endearing at first, watching the youngster discover the world at such a young age, but on home turf and with jet lag setting in on a serious level, Hayley didn’t have the energy to entertain her drummer’s excitable nature.  
  
Neither, evidently, could his brother.  
  
“Zac, for the love of everything that is good in this world, please shut up,” Josh muttered, rubbing one eye with his spare hand. “It’s an unthinkable hour of the morning. I really couldn’t care if we had crossed the solar system in our sleep.”  
  
The comments were unusually sharp-tongued from the guitarist, but Hayley had been fully expecting them. For the past month or two, moody had been Josh’s only preset and with the two brothers constantly in close quarters to one another, Josh and Zac had been caught arguing more than once throughout the course of the tour. Hayley watched Josh flick a stray strand of hair from his face. His jaw was set and his eyes were looking anywhere but the other members of his band. Again, not an uncommon thing as of late. Everyone had tried talking about it to him, but he just stonewalled them with a charming smile and muttered variations of ‘I’m fine, honestly’.  
  
“There’s no need to be rude, Josh. Just because you’re PMS-ing like a single girl without chocolate, doesn’t mean…”  
  
Hayley attempted to drown out the garbled beginnings of another Farro argument as she headed for the door. The sunlight was already blinding her, sending heavy block shadows across the floor. They seemed harsh and unforgiving, a contrast to the gentle sunlight that had greeted her upon her last arrival. Maybe she had too much on her mind. Maybe she was worrying about nothing. Maybe everything would be just like the mask that Paramore had adopted; happy-go-lucky and life-changing.  
  
Maybe going home wouldn’t seem like such a chore.


	2. Chapter 2

Josh Farro couldn’t even find the energy to hit the snooze button on his alarm clock.  
  
A shrieking chorus seemed to blare from the tiny device, hitting off of the walls and echoing around the oddly vacant room. After nearly a year of sharing a tour-bus with a multitude of people, the loneliness hit him like a tonne of bricks. He knew he wasn’t the only person in the entire house – he could hear Zac cursing loudly in the room adjacent to his own – but it didn’t seem right, sleeping in a room without the other people that had made up the past year of his life.  
  
Rolling over and shoving his face into the pillow, Josh groaned. He didn’t have the motivation to do anything. Truth be told, he hadn’t had the motivation to do anything for at least a month. He had run himself completely into the ground and forcing himself to stay focused on something he  _really_  didn’t want to do had taken more out of him than he had thought it initially would. He had exhausted himself both mentally and physically and now that he wasn’t being forced to get up and be productive, he couldn’t bring himself to get out of bed.  
  
“Josh can you turn off your alarm clock? I’m kinda trying to sleep through there.”  
  
Josh didn’t even have to look up. He knew that his brother would be standing at the door, one hand on his hip and the other hand rubbing bleary eyes as he glared pointedly at his brother through the last groggy throes of sleep. He didn’t even bother to crack an eye open as he gestured wildly to the door.  
  
“Go away, Zac,” Josh muttered, the husky scratching of the beginnings of a sore throat lost to the vast fluffiness of the pillow that partially obscured his mouth. He heard Zac sigh, followed by several shuffling footsteps before the alarm was cut off mid-siren. The sound seemed to still ring in his ears as he finally turned his attention to the younger brunette, who was gazing at Josh with what seemed like pity.  
  
“Dude, get up. You’re not moping around all day. Not on my watch.” Zac attempted to grab a corner of the duvet off of Josh, but the elder sibling snatched the quilt up before he could.  
  
“I can do what I want,” Josh muttered, perhaps a little immaturely. A mischievous gleam seemed to appear in Zac’s eyes almost instantly and before Josh could move, five foot and ten inches of drummer collided with his bare shoulders at a rapid rate of knots.  
  
“Zac, gerroff!” Josh hissed after a second, attempting to push his brother from his bed. Zac shook his head, crossing his arms. Josh silently cursed his younger brother for being stronger than he was and tried to twist his body from the makeshift prison that Zac had created.  
  
“You’re going to get up and we’re going to do something, anything. We’ll go and see the others but I’ll be damned if you’re staying in bed all day if I can’t,” Zac called firmly, ever the diplomat. The rate that Zac could go from immature teenager to sensible adult shocked Josh at times, but it was hardly surprising. The kid had been forced to grow up faster than anyone else in the band and in some ways, he had taken it better than the others. Nothing seemed to faze him, but he still had his bouts of immaturity. Immaturity that often resulted in Josh becoming injured in some way.  
  
“If I agree, will you get off of me?” Josh asked resignedly. He knew better than to argue with Zac at nine in the morning, especially when his own alarm had been the cause of everyone’s awakening. At that point, there was nothing that Josh wanted to do less than to get up and have to face the world, but if it would stop his shoulders from aching, then so be it.  
  
“Duuh,” Zac said with a short roll of his eyes. Immaturity at its finest – another rapid change from the level-headed kid that just wanted everyone to be happy. The flipsides had become more evident as tensions had heightened at the tail end of the tour and sometimes, Josh felt for Zac. All he seemed to care about was making everyone feel good about themselves, sometimes to the detriment of his own happiness. He took everything to heart and it was that and that alone that made Josh yield to his younger brother’s plans. He was just trying to help.  
  
“Sure,” Josh sighed, sitting up as Zac rolled himself off of Josh’s bed, grinning widely. “Sure, let’s do something.”


	3. Chapter 3

Hayley didn’t want to see Josh.

In fact, Hayley didn’t want to see much of anyone. She didn’t want to see Zac and his unfailing ability to be happy twenty-four hours of the day, seven days a week. She didn’t want to see Jeremy and his lack of concern for pretty much anything. She didn’t want to think about her band and how it was driving her to hate her best friends. She didn’t want to think about the argument that had caused Hayley and Josh to drift apart for months. She didn’t want to have to make conversation with anyone because she knew it would be difficult and break down into uneasy silence. In all honesty, she just wanted to stay at home and shoot up a few zombies on her television screen, so she had no idea why she found herself sitting in a tiny café that they had found in a secluded alleyway a few years back, bored and struggling for anything interesting to do in the social enigma that was Franklin, Tennessee. She had been the first one to arrive – the boys were never early and almost never arrived on time – so she had ordered her usual milkshake. After all, tour was over. She could have as much dairy as she wanted and the chocolate milkshake was too good to avoid.

The liquid in her glass had been halved before Hayley found herself with company. Amazingly enough, all three of the others had managed to perfectly coordinate their entry. She caught eyes with both Zac and Jeremy, but Josh disappeared quickly, no doubt ordering everyone’s lunch to avoid any awkward attempts at conversation.

“Sorry we’re late,” Jeremy murmured sheepishly, slotting himself into the booth carefully. Hayley didn’t think it was possible, but since they had returned, Jeremy seemed to have made himself even scruffier than normal. Stifling a small grin, she shook her head.

“Don’t worry about it, I expect it now,” she chuckled, unable to keep her smile back any longer. Without deadlines and being in constant contact with one another, the band relationship seemed to be slowly repairing itself. Maybe time out was what they all needed.

“Morning!” Zac beamed, throwing himself haphazardly into the booth, almost knocking Jeremy flying. The bassist scowled momentarily, but before it could be caught by anyone else, he rearranged his face into a grin.

“Lay off the pancakes, buddy, you nearly crushed me,” he joked, earning a punch in the arm from Zac. Hayley smiled wider. Watching the rhythm section goof off like they had before ‘the incident’ seemed to bring everything back down to earth. It made everything feel like it was going back to the way it was before, that everything was slowly making its way back to normality.

One small cough brought that entire hope crashing down, though.

“Hey,” Josh murmured after a moment, barely looking up from the plates balanced precariously in his hands, “Chips okay, Hayley?”

Hayley had to stop herself from raising an eyebrow. They had barely spoken a word to each other for months and Josh had finally made the first move. Granted, he was being incredibly invasive and shifty, but it was a start.

Right?


	4. Chapter 4

No one was more awkward than Joshua Farro.  
  
The guitarist cursed himself silently as he followed his brother and Jeremy in the direction of the park. He had known from the very second he stepped foot into the diner that lunch was a bad idea. He still wasn’t fully over ‘the incident’, and he knew for a fact that everyone else wasn’t ready to bring it up. Group discussion was a big thing in the band, but when it involved harboured feelings it just didn’t make it to the big group therapy sessions. And of course, instead of taking Hayley aside and speaking to her, he had so  _stupidly_  decided to attempt to make small talk. Fat load of good that did for anyone.  
  
Zac and Jeremy were talking animatedly about the impromptu soccer match they were going to play, beaten-up football nestled safely in the crook of Jeremy’s arm. He could hear his brother’s slightly louder tones drowning out Jeremy’s calming voice, but they both seemed to merge into each other. Josh wasn’t paying an ounce of attention to the athletics talk. He hadn’t ever been an avid player anyway – too skeleton-like, he wasn’t built to go up against any other guy.  
  
Josh couldn’t help but let his mind wander to the argument that started it all. Sure, he had been a little rude, but he wasn’t the only one that had run his mouth. Hayley had done her fair share of shrieking. And yet, he had been the one in the wrong from day one. Josh had never really understood how Hayley could manipulate others onto her side as quickly as she did every time an argument didn’t go her way.  
  
Or maybe Josh was just overthinking everything. Maybe he had been in the wrong. Either way, that  _pointless_  argument had caused a rift between the once-inseparable couple and that rift had slowly caused fissures between the others. Josh knew that those wouldn’t take any healing at all. All that Jeremy and Zac wanted was for the arguments to cease. Once that happened, they’d be happy to go back to normal. Hayley would be more difficult. The longer that they had kept pushing back the inevitable conversation that would have to take place, the wider the rift had gotten. If they left it any longer, they wouldn’t even be able to salvage a friendship out of the tatters that had been their relationship.  
  
At this stage, trying to resurrect a friendship from the ashes seemed like the safest approach to Josh. The only problem would be overcoming his own stubbornness, because he was almost positive that Hayley wasn’t going to be crossing that bridge any time soon. It was why they had worked for so long – neither of them had wanted to admit that they weren’t compatible because that would be admitting fault or failure on their own part and each party had just been too stubborn to even try and admit that. Once the accusations had started flowing, however, they wouldn’t stop. Neither party had wanted to admit fault and that instantly meant that the other was wrong. Everyone was always wrong, but no one was ever right.  
  
A set of fingers appeared in Josh’s peripheral vision and he jumped visibly as a loud snap brought him out of the trance-like behaviour he had slumped into yet again.  
  
“Anyone in there?” Jeremy asked with a cheeky grin, throwing the football from hand to hand. “We’re here and you look like you’re plotting to blow up the Pentagon or something as ridiculous.”  
  
Josh could feel the soft cushion of grass underneath his sneakers. Forcing a smile onto his face, he shook his head and took a confident step forward.  
  
“Just thinking is all – and no, Zac, that doesn’t call for a stupid joke about how my thinking is a dangerous sport in itself,” he joked, desperately wishing he was anywhere but in the company of two of his best friends at that moment in time. “Now are we playing or what?”


	5. Chapter 5

_“What did I do wrong, exactly?”  
  
“You know, Josh.”  
  
“Actually I don’t, so before you start accusing me of being wrong again, you need to let me know why. Can’t fix what you don’t think is broken, it’s impossible.”  
  
“You can’t see what’s wrong because you’re an arrogant, self-absorbed jerk who thinks that the world revolves around your own wellbeing!”  
  
“And you aren’t?”  
  
“Shut up, Josh.”  
  
“Take your own advice, Hayley.” _  
  
Hayley had replayed the very start of the argument over and over again in her head and despite the fact that she had psycho-analysed every single word, she couldn’t find a way to apologise to Josh, nor could she find a way to admit she was completely at fault as he had said countless times before. She hadn’t been right, sure, but she hadn’t been the only one in the wrong. They had both been to blame and until Josh showed signs of accepting that, Hayley sure as hell wasn’t going to go running back to him, begging that he take her back. She hadn’t ever been one of those crazy girls and she wasn’t about to start that routine now.  
  
She had been completing this routine since the two had refused to speak to each other; stare at the ceiling for ten minutes, replay the argument in her head, think about how it could have ended differently. All of this took about twenty minutes and at the end of the twenty minutes, she would reach the same conclusion she always did – Josh would make the first move. Today had been progress. Granted, he had only asked her if chips were okay, but it was a sentence more than she had been able to get out of him in the past three months combined.  
  
Hayley had studied the faint whorls in the smooth plaster of her bedroom ceiling more in the past few days than she had ever done beforehand and for some unknown reason, that fact angered her. She just wanted to get everything back to normal and write music with her best friends again. She didn’t want to have to go through the  _bullshit_  she had been through, worrying constantly if she had said the right thing to the right person, or whether her carefully-placed words were going to cause the entire band to fall apart at the seams. She knew fine well that Jeremy was holding the band together, but he was the eroding glue on a worn toy and Hayley knew that it wouldn’t take much to cause that toy to break apart. One wrong word from Zac would sever the already battered familial bond that he and Josh shared. One well-placed insult would send Zac veering away from Hayley. And, as it was, Josh and Hayley had already drifted eons apart over such a short space of time.  
  
Paramore was broken and Hayley knew this. She just didn’t know how to get everyone back together again without sacrificing her own happiness.


	6. Chapter 6

“You just need to admit defeat, dude. This is getting stupid now.”  
  
Josh had known that playing video games with his brother wasn’t just going to entail running a few cars around a racetrack, but he had still agreed to it. Nonetheless, when Zac opened his mouth, Josh had groaned internally as he had braced himself for an earful.  
  
“It isn’t just affecting you and Hayley, it’s affecting everyone else,” Zac continued, not even waiting on a response from his older brother. Nudging an elbow into Zac’s ribs, Josh pulled the on-screen car around a corner, narrowly avoiding crashing into the railings as he overtook Zac’s car.  
  
“I’m not just going to  _admit defeat_  because I’m not completely in the wrong,” Josh muttered under his breath as he accelerated through the straight. “Besides, everyone else shouldn’t be getting involved in arguments that aren’t their own.”  
  
Zac scowled at the obvious dig and threw all of his weight into his brother. Josh’s thumb struck the controller joystick and his car spun out, leaving him facing in the opposite direction than that of which he should have been going. Zac’s car sped past at lightning speed.  
  
“We’re not getting involved, I’m just suggesting that maybe your negative mood is causing everyone else to be bummed out,” Zac explained as he kept his eyes trained on the television set, fingers barely moving as he navigated his way around the track with expert knowledge. Josh righted his own car and resumed the chase to the finishing line.  
  
“I know,” Josh sighed as he swung his car around a tight corner, “believe me, I know. But it isn’t something that’s going to right itself by me telling Hayley I was wrong. Nothing’s going to be right until everyone involved realises their own flaws.”  
  
“And do you?” Zac asked, doing a mini victory dance as his car flew over the finishing line just seconds before Josh. With the game now finished, he turned to Josh with an unusually serious expression painted across his face. “Do you know what you did wrong?”  
  
Admitting defeat wasn’t Josh’s strong point, whether this was in game format or in his everyday life. But as he carelessly dropped the controller onto the floor and turned to face Zac, Josh realised with a start that maybe that was what it was going to take – his own admittance of his wrongdoings. Even if Zac wasn’t Hayley – for starters, the hair was startlingly different and he wouldn’t ever dream of sleeping with his brother in a million, _trillion_  years – that admittance could be the beginning of the end. If it was a naïve thought, then it was a naïve thought. Either way, even the thought of talking about the argument was beginning to lift a weight off of his shoulders.  
  
“I was a jerk,” Josh began, tugging at the back of his lip ring with his teeth, “and yeah, maybe I was a bit clingy. Maybe I was moody. But --”  
  
“No ‘buts’, Josh,” Zac said, before devolving into a fit of giggles. He took a few seconds and then straightened his face out. “Sorry, keep going.”  
  
“Talking to you is so self-destructive,” Josh groaned. “Okay, I started the argument. I brought up some things that I probably do myself, so I was a bit of a hypocrite. And she isn’t always as bad as I made her out to be.”  
  
“This is good. I shoulda been a psychologist,” Zac said with a sideways grin at his brother. Josh groaned and rolled his eyes.  
  
“Psychiatrist, Zac. Few psychologists work with patients.”  
  
“Whatever.” Zac dismissed Josh’s correction with a wave of his hand. “You should tell Hayley all of this.”  
  
Another tug of the lip ring. Josh frowned, shaking his head for a few seconds. The thought of potentially starting another argument with Hayley made Josh want to vomit. The first one had broken the two of them up. Another could break up the entire band.  
  
“And if she just agrees with me and puts me completely at fault?” Josh asked after a moment. Zac shrugged, grabbing his controller and pointing towards Josh’s, which was lying discarded next to the sofa.  
  
“I dunno, I'm not a psychologist. Rematch?”


End file.
